New York at Work; Rats Are His Bread, Roaches His Butter

By N. R. KLEINFIELD

Published: July 17, 1991

Now that he has annihilated millions of cockroaches and rodents, not to mention preposterous quantities of silverfish, cereal mites, carpet beetles, bedbugs, ants, wasps, termites and a few snakes, Sam Bloom figures he knows a thing or two about pest control. Don't serve beer to the cockroaches. Make sure the rats don't get into the bulldozer seats. Stick your empty soda cans in the dishwasher.

Mr. Bloom runs Standard Exterminating in Long Island City, one of the city's oldest exterminators. It will gladly eradicate pests anywhere within the five boroughs. Occasionally, it will dispatch someone into the suburbs for a good flying ant or earwig problem. "And we don't really charge anything for our service," Mr. Bloom likes to say. "Just a dollar apiece for the little funerals."

Exterminating is one of the hardiest professions in New York, for the simple reason that New York pests are impressively obstinate. Yet over the years, the war on bugs has got appreciably more refined, as Standard Exterminating, enemy of insects since 1929, knows well. Exterminators don't even like to be called exterminators anymore. They prefer pest-control technicians. They're Everywhere

There's no mistaking a pest-control technician's office. Just study the walls. Exterminators usually don't go in for those pictures of fruit or verdant farm fields. They like pest art. As you enter the offices of Standard Exterminating on Steinway Street, there's a fairly flattering portrait of a cockroach next to a picture of a good-looking silverfish. Down the way a bit come the rat drawings. At home, Mr. Bloom continues to add to a sizable collection of mice and rat figurines. "To other people, they're pests," he said. "To me, they're bread and butter."

Mr. Bloom, a cheerful, roostery man 67 years old, got into exterminating in 1960, when he took over Standard from his father-in-law. He runs it with his son, Gil, and employs 16 technicians. He's treated every imaginable place where creatures crawl -- air-traffic control towers at Kennedy International Airport, funeral parlors, sports stadiums, the lower deck of the George Washington Bridge. He wiped out fungus gnats inside the vaults of a jewelry company.

"No facility is pest-proof," he said the other day while holed up in his office. "If it were, and you walked in there with a cup of coffee in a paper bag, you just breached that pest-proof area. Because there is probably a roach inside the folds of that paper bag."

Cockroaches, which inhabit New York in infuriating density, remain the leading opponent of exterminators. They have been around for some 400 million years, give or take a few million, and each can bear thousands of offspring in its two-year lifespan. Roaches develop immunity to poisons, and thus scientists must concoct fresh poisons to combat them. Standard puts down a variety of organic phosphates and boric acids, and since the mid-1980's, amidinohydrazones have become popular for their success in abbreviating cockroaches' lives.

Still, the exterminating profession has some slipshod practitioners, known for waddling into an apartment and spraying along the bottoms of the walls and hoping for the best. They are mocked as "baseboard jockeys."

"You have to put the spray where the roaches are," Mr. Bloom explained. "That means in the cracks and crevices, not just along the baseboards.

"One of the things about this business today is you find roaches in places you didn't find them before," he said.

Mr. Bloom has encountered roaches in television sets and in the linings of a refrigerator. He has sprayed lottery machines at candy stores. Roaches are not fussy eaters. They can survive on toothpaste. They savor the grease from a refrigerator motor. They will settle for a decent toupee. If nothing tastier turns up, they'll eat the newsprint of the article you're now reading.

Mr. Bloom is all for recycling, but in his line of work recycling has meant aggravation. Garbage bags and empty cans make splendid homes for roaches. "People keep 30 or 40 bags lying around," Mr. Bloom said. "The glue that glued the bags together is food for roaches. There could be spilled coffee in a bag. As far as I know, roaches don't drink coffee, but they eat the sugar in the coffee. And the bag is warm and dark, just what roaches like.

"Empty cans are breeding grounds, too. No one washes the food residue out of empty cans. You're not going to put empty cans in the dishwasher, though you should. Beer cans are the worst. Roaches love beer. It's full of dense carbohydrates and roaches are big on heavy carbohydrates."

The blazing sun suffused the interior of Joe Entler's Chevy truck. He was heading east on the Grand Central Parkway, working the Jamaica-Queens Village route for Standard Exterminating. How does it compare with other areas? "It's full of bugs," he said.

Mr. Entler came to exterminating 13 years ago, after shimmying under cars as a mechanic for Mercedes-Benz. He admits it takes a while to become hardened to the life. When he began, he used to have recurrent "crawly" dreams, and he would dart home during the day to take showers. Now he's mellow about all the creatures he meets.